Much of the magic of WhatsApp is in its elegant simplicity. While it’s still tied to mobile phones, it works equally well on both the iPhone and Android platforms, and there are Mac and Windows apps and even a web client that works in any modern browser. Nevertheless, while Apple created a solution for its own club of iPhone, iPad, and Mac users, and Google floundered about, WhatsApp created a platform-agnostic solution that just worked. Still, its attempts felt rudderless and never gained much traction, at least not until it more recently embraced the RCS messaging standard. Apple successfully did something similar in 2011 with its popular iMessage platform, and Google took several stabs at it with a variety of messaging apps. WhatsApp wasn’t the only app to try to address these limitations. Its younger brother, MMS, allows for the exchange of small bits of media, which amount to low-resolution photos and sound bites, but it’s effectively useless for exchanging videos and still lacks things like read receipts and status indicators. SMS was, and continues to be, stuck in the dark ages of technology, with 160-character limits and no support for anything other than pure text.

However, the point of WhatsApp was to replace SMS (and the lightly media-capable MMS) with a new platform that could overcome the limitations inherent in the archaic carrier-based messaging services. So, what exactly is WhatsApp? At its most basic level, it’s simply a chat app for exchanging messages with your friends, not unlike the SMS text messaging that’s built into nearly every mobile phone. What is WhatsApp? Joe Maring/Digital Trends Since its 2014 acquisition by Facebook (now Meta), WhatsApp has reached a point where it’s now become the de facto standard for cross-platform messaging worldwide, with over 5 billion installs from the Google Play Store and 2 billion active monthly users. WhatsApp just upgraded its emoji reactions and I want them now You’ll soon be able to use WhatsApp on more than one phone

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